Owen Hearey
PhD Candidate
UCLA Economics

I will be available for interviews at the ASSA meetings in San Francisco on January 3-5, 2016.

The Effect of Rising Income Inequality Across Neighborhoods on Local School Funding and Enrollment (Job Market Paper)

Income inequality across neighborhoods more than doubled in the U.S. between 1970 and 2010. This spatial reallocation of household income may affect public schools through changes to the distribution of peers and provision of local tax revenues. I find that rising income inequality across neighborhoods within a school district increases local public school funding, suggesting that the median voter substitutes a higher property tax rate for declines in neighborhood peer quality. But this income sorting also depresses human capital investment, primarily due to a widening enrollment gap between low- and high-income neighborhoods. These results are robust to instrumenting for changes in neighborhood incomes with the initial allocation of households interacted with differential national trends in household income growth by percentile.